There’s a long-standing assumption in many boardrooms: that company culture begins and ends with HR.
It doesn’t.
Culture is not a policy or a program. It’s not an initiative led by the People team or a well-designed slide in a boardroom. It's what happens in the everyday in the 1:1s, team meetings, and feedback on Slack. It's how leaders manage their own stress and expectations while responding to tension and challenges.
The people who shape that experience, day in and day out? Your line managers.
The same people who are managing poor performers between budget cuts and back-to-back meetings. The ones caught between strategic expectations and operational chaos. The ones who work, often without training, skills insight needed to lead an increasingly disillusioned workplace.
The Culture- Performance Gap
Every executive says culture matters, but if you follow the chain of accountability, the story starts to fall apart.
It goes something like this:
Leadership says they care about culture.
They task HR with improving it.
Then, they expect line managers to deliver it.
That gap between directive and behavior is where culture falls apart. It’s also where engagement stagnates, trust erodes and undervalued high performers look for new jobs. Crucially, it's where we see managers buckle under the weight of responsibilities they were never equipped to carry.
The numbers underscore this disconnect. Gallup research shows that managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores. Yet only 44% of managers have received any formal training to manage people at all, and over 60% say they don't feel equipped to lead on cultural or emotional issues.
So, while employee experience might be a priority on the slide deck, the lived reality inside most organisations shapes a different narrative.
Culture is a System, Not a Birthday Cake
Too often, organizations mistake perks for culture. While birthday cakes, team shout-outs, wellness weeks can feel supportive in the moment, without deeper alignment, they are often seen as performative, or worse, manipulative.
Real culture is shaped by patterns of behavior such as how feedback is given, who gets heard, who gets promoted, and whether someone feels safe to challenge the status quo. It's shaped by the tone of an email, the tension before a difficult conversation, and the “why” behind decisions that impact people’s lives. It's about how people treat each other, respect one another's expertise and how decisions are made.
- Have you trained them to coach, not just instruct?
- Do they have access to the emotional data of their teams?
- Are you rewarding the conditions that lead to performance — or just the outcomes?
If you answer no to any of these questions, your culture is fragile. Not because you don’t care, but because the structure required to sustain it isn’t there.
Your Managers Are Your Ultimate Culture Ambassadors...
When people leave their jobs, they're often leaving a manager. They're often tired of feeling devalued, shut down or unsupported. They're disillusioned by the gap between the PR spin on culture and their lived experience. A recent study by People Management found that employees who trust their direct manager are 12 times more likely to be fully engaged at work. Yet, the majority of managers say they feel unequipped to build that trust.
“The point of platforms, dashboards and pulse surveys aren’t to replace the trust that comes from consistency and human interactions. They are there to help managers navigate those moments in a way that best benefits the employee and the company, and right now, they’re simply not getting the support they need,” says Ryan Tahmassebi, Director of People Science at WorkBuzz.
Yet, You're Placing Them in an Impossible Position
Don't believe us? Let's take a look at what most leadership teams are asking of line managers today: Be a coach, counselor, performance optimizer, culture guardian, and business driver, all while hitting quarterly targets with increasingly stretched teams. They’re caught between employee expectations for flexibility, empathy, and growth, and leadership demands for efficiency, accountability, and results.
The psychological burden is real. WorkBuzz data consistently shows that line managers feel burned out, with “people management responsibilities” cited as one of the fastest-growing stressors. It’s not just internal pressure, they’re also navigating a perfect storm of external shifts. Think: new working patterns, blurred boundaries, increased accountability, and a growing expectation to manage emotional dynamics they were never trained to handle.
Empowerment Is a System, Not a Motivational Speech
At WorkBuzz, we’ve worked with organisations across every major sector — from healthcare to hospitality, retail to manufacturing, and we’ve seen what works.
The highest-performing organisations don’t just listen to their people; they take what they are saying on board and act. They equip managers with real-time sentiment data, build coaching into weekly routines, and tie performance to the quality of team experience, not just output.
Here’s what those organisations have in common:
- Always-on listening at the team level, not just the organizational level
- Clear, actionable insights managers can understand and use
- Rituals and rhythms that support consistent communication and alignment
- Performance incentives that value psychological safety, not just productivity
But here’s the catch: even with the right data, most managers simply don’t have the time to analyze it because they're already overloaded. That’s the whole purpose behind People Science AI which offers quick AI-powered summaries that cut through the noise and turn hours of dashboard analysis into a few minutes of actionable takeaways. The result? No more data overwhelm. Just the exact insights they need to support their teams with confidence and clarity.
A Final Thought
Building empowerment into the everyday moments between managers and their teams require that you look at the systems you are putting in place to make those moments easier, smarter, and more impactful.
Since culture lives with managers, so should your investment. Coach them. Support them. Empower them. Not with slogans, but with structure and systems that work.
Stop treating culture like a communications campaign and commit to address it like the behavioural system it really is. This is how you will move from just measuring engagement instead to actually building it.
Ready to streamline employee engagement and gain actionable insights? Tools like WorkBuzz's People Science AI offer a way forward. Designed to provide instant, data-driven feedback, WorkBuzz makes it easier to respond to employee needs and foster a more productive workplace. Learn more here.